I've also been updating my photo collection on Flickr a lot over the past week or so with my archive of 5 years of photos. I'm trying to post a handful every day. (Thanks to that other Grant for giving me a Flickr Pro membership which lets me post lots and lots of photos.)

A reader wrote me about my post last month on Jim Trudeau shares his thoughts upon visiting Dachau:

Enjoy your blog but to compare Rwanda/Nazis etc. to a few USArmy clowns putting panties on some suspected terrorists head is the slipperiest of slopes. Such moral equivalency defeats much of what you say you care about.

In particular, the paragraph:"The people of Nazi Germany, the people of the Rwandan Genocide, the European invaders of the Americas, the lynch-mobs of the U.S., the soldiers in Abu-Ghraib, the slavers of Sudan - and the countless others who would take days to fully enumerate here - we have no fundamental difference from any of those people."

Note that I did not say those were the same or equivalent things, just that they were all (as I called it in the next paragraph) "unimaginable horrors".

Evil is evil - regardless of the scale or extent. Yes, some atrocities are more atrocious than others - but they are all still atrocious.

As to what happened at Abu Ghraib (and Guantanamo, and other places we presumably haven't heard about), to diminish it to "a few USArmy clowns putting panties on some suspected terrorists head" is to belittle the extent of crimes and horrors perpetrated there. Certainly it is not on the scale of genocide, but it's still deeply evil.

In any case, my point was to argue the case that however 'civilized' we may feel we are, we are not immune to succumbing to barbarism.

I found out a few days after I arrived in Gibsons that it's where "The Beachcombers" was filmed. I have to find a free moment to go down to the dock and get my picture taken - 'real tourist style' (you will not survive my tourist-style kung-fu!).